NFV/SDN

Within the whirlwind of changes brought by the peaceful transfer of leadership the United States experience on 20 January 2017, are a shift in the perspectives and policies of the FCC. As this recent article in Forbes points out, it is no longer a question of IF the Net Neutrality rules of 2015 will be rolled back but of WHEN and HOW MUCH? While this has streaming services like Netflix and Hulu shaking in their gross margin boots and explains the investment of ISPs in content over the last few years, this also has an impact of other Over The Top (OTT) services like Facebook, Twitter, Skype, SnapChat, Apple Messages and others. Not only could ISP’s back charge these providers for preferred access on their networks but could also start to share those ‘costs’ with consumers, bundling favored SnapChat access into family plans the way we used to buy SMS messages in bulk.

And OTT service running over these networks that hasn’t yet seem to bubble up to the top rank angst over binge watching the latest season of Iron Fist on Netflix is the Internet of Things, or as I like to refer to it, the Internets of Things. ISP’s, loosed from the equal access/equal performance requirements of Net Neutrality can now price and provision premium IoT services, reducing latency, guaranteeing uptimes and other aspects critical to the deployment of IoT endpoints and their web of connections back to the home office. While this is very good for the firms seeking to deploy IoT solutions this could also turn into a boon for ISPs fighting the slow spiral of dumb data pipe-ness.

There is balance to be struck here. IoT promises to be the biggest economic disruption we’ve seen since the iPhone was launched a decade ago. While there are significant economic rents to be collected, if ISP’s set their premium access pricing for IoT deployments too high, it will delay the recognition of that hoped for revenue and slow the grow of the IoT market significantly. Firms seeking to embrace the promise of IoT are already complaining about the cost per endpoint for connectivity. Imagine the temptation to raise that price as we shift to a non-neutral internet.

Granted, the opposite could also be true for savvy ISP’s. Imagine a carrier bundling lower cost access for IoT deployments based on the lifting of the rules, sharing access across the billions of endpoints required to realize the promise of IoT and enabling tiers of service and performance so that IoT applications that are more tolerance of high latency, lossy data, etc. can realize the benefits of a sliced access internet. A connected pacemaker has more stringent latency requirements than a lawn sprinkler, why charge the same for access?

In our last post you heard more about the evils of Corporate Bias and how our metrics help identify and then mitigate the risk of being a LOUD brand through Social Narcissism. In this post we will shift from an inner focus on how much brands and their advocates reference themselves to an external focus on how the brand content resonates with the market. External Amplification is a metric of how much your content is being shared outside of your brand advocates and employees. Because we track the brand advocates for a given brand, we can determine which of the retweets and other forms of amplification are from the those external to the brand.

For example, if a brand like Cisco tweeted out an announcement regarding a new strategy targeting Autonomous Vehicles, naturally several brand advocates would echo this message out to their networks. In this example, let’s say this tweet attracts 125 retweets by Cisco employees and other advocates we’ve identified as being part of their “Circle of Trust.” At first glance, this looks like a great result. Issue is that the total retweets of this announcement is only 130, which means that while the ratio of tweet to retweet looks awesome(130:1), the actual ratio is 5:1, meaning that only 5 people/accounts outside of your existing advocates found your content to be compelling enough to retweet. Typically we average this metric across all mentions authored by a brand for a given time period to understand, in general, if their message is being picked up and shared out beyond their ‘Circle of Trust.’

Again, pulling data from the Network Function Virtualization market, we see some real results to analyze together:

Brand

Mentions

Corporate Bias

External Retweets

External Amplification

Brocade

16

93.80%

15

0.938

HPE

23

60.90%

21

0.913

Cisco

15

53.30%

27

1.8

Juniper

23

17.40%

14

0.609

Notice that our Corporate Bias culprit, Juniper, also has the worst External Amplification. So not only are they behaving as a LOUD brand, just crowing their own name, but they are also crowing a message that is being amplified at almost half the rate of the competition in this market.

That is another important feature of this metric. This is based on amplification WITHIN the target market. Having people/accounts outside of your market amplify your message is interesting but not useful in advancing your dominance. Knowing that the cousins of all of your employees are helping broadcast your message to their neighbors does not help you grow your awareness within the target market Network Function Virtualization. That is why we pull all these metrics from conversations related to your market instead of your brand. This let’s you see the growing influence your content is gaining for you within the market and, at times more importantly, against your competition.

In the example above, HPE might have a lower Corporate Bias than Brocade, but their content is performing almost as well. Cisco is the only brand with an External Amplification greater than one, showing a multiplying effect of their NFV content, especially relative to their chief competitors. You would only know this if you had the entire market conversation captured, not just the branded ones. You can see how External Amplification is an actionable metric, you can immediately see how your content is resonating relative to the competition, tracking the impact of your campaigns on growing awareness outside of your advocates in real time. This helps you bypass being LOUD and go straight to being effective.

This is what we do at Argus Insights, we focus on metrics that matter, metrics that help our clients move markets. External Amplification is just one of many metrics we have developed to help our clients craft the right actions to drive growth and engagement. let us know if you’d like to learn more! You can also sign up for our free market analysis newsletter.

Cisco led mindshare in Software Defined Network (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) market discussion last week. While the company historically competes with VMware in the SDN space, CRN reported that partners working with both vendors “are now deploying Cisco and VMware’s SDN side-by-side and finding them more complementary than competitive.” This eliminates the “either-or decision between Cisco and VMware,” and creates opportunities to solve even more complex challenges. This announcement made a big impact on market discussion, accounting for nearly 25 percent of SDN and NFV Twitter conversation last Thursday.

The world of SDN and NFV is getting smaller as large companies continue to acquire smaller ones to enhance their offerings. Huawei dominated SDN and NFV social discussion early last week as news of their acquisition of Irish software development and SDN service solution company, Amartus, spread. This acquisition marks yet another major player expanding their software assets to accelerate their SDN offering and demonstrates “Huawei’s commitment to expanding its research and development investment in Ireland and across Europe.” Huawei was not the only company to gain attention for acquisitions last week, as discussion of Huawei’s recent acquisition occurred while SDxCentral’s interview about Brocade’s SDN & NFV Acquisitions was still trending.

Other companies are pairing up to offer solutions, too. NEC saw attention for their collaboration with HP on NFV for Service Providers. eWeek reported that NEC will “run its virtual network functions on HP’s OpenNFV platform” as a solution that NEC and HP hope will “accelerate carrier adoption of NFV.”

While Cisco saw attention for investing in the French software company 6Wind a couple weeks ago, this week they were caught in the crossfire of competing companies as Dell’s VP of Engineered Solutions targeted them and the effectiveness of their solutions. He said: “software-defined is kryptonite to Cisco.” Cisco is not alone on Dell’s war path, however, as Dell’s Ganthier also singled out HP as a company that “has followed industry trends more than it has led.” Speaking on his own company, Ganthier told CRN about Dell’s “’open’ and ‘agile’ strategy,” and how Dell plans to lead the market, not just react to change.

The merging of companies and their technology is accelerating the path to software solutions, and Argus Insights is tracking everything along the way. Find out where you can stand against your competition, we would love to help you increase your standing and awareness, contact us for a free consultation.

Argus Insights has been tracking all social conversation about Mobile World Congress, and is ready to reveal some of the most popular brands of the show. Our winners secured the most mindshare in their category, prompting continued engagement and conversation.

With cloud related announcements ranging from an Industrial Cloud partnership with Intel to a Connected Traffic Cloud to introducing a Volvo cloud platform, Ericsson gave MWC followers a lot to talk about

NFV

HP was driving interest in NFV through their proof of concept with Orange, OpenNFV partnership with Telefonica, and targeted comments from their CEO about improving infrastructure with virtualization.

Smartphones

Though the smartphone giant was not actually present at the show, Apple dominated mindshare and the iPhone 6 was awarded ‘Best Mobile of the Year’ along with the LG G3

Wearables

Huawei got people talking with the early announcement of the round, Android Wear enabled Huawei Watch.

For more details about why and how these brands won mindshare during the show, and an outline of overall trends plus winners and losers in several more categories, request a copy of our Mobile World Congress 2015 Report. Typically a $3,000 value, we are offering this report to our readers for free.